Open Media Project

This group is where users and developers of the Knight sponsored Open Media Project share information, discussions, and documentation. The Open Media Project is both a suite of modules based on the system developed by Denver Open Media and the group of 7 development partners who are contributing development, testing, documentation, training or other resources to make the Open Media modules more usable for both the PEG and Drupal communities.

The primary goal of the Open Media Project is to leverage Drupal to give local communities more control over their public access channel. The system will build on several existing modules and maintain the suite of new modules through Drupal's CVS. This is a different approach than most of the previous investments the PEG community has made in Drupal. We are also committed to developing modules that are flexible enough for a variety of uses beyond public access channels.

I've aggregated content related to the Open Media Project and CiviCRM from several sources (GDO, openmediaproject.org, blip.tv, DOM) and compiled it in list form here. This content deals with integrating CiviCRM and MERCI, establishing CiviEvents for classes, as well importing Facil data. My reason for doing this is because I completed importing data into MERCI, and am looking to re-import user data and focus attention on the CiviCRM side of things. I started looked at all these resources independently and realized it be good if they were all on one page.

NOTE: There has been ongoing debate as to the best location to post documentation (or even raw documentation as this is), and while www.openmediaproject.org was provisionally agreed upon as the best landing place for this, I feel that GDO OMP may be more accessible and definitely has a wider audience.

We have a lot of resources and equipment here at channelAustin: a variety of microphones, light kits, cameras, 3 studios, and more. Just the checkout gear alone has added up to about 95 content types for MERCI. This includes both buckets and resources for singular items like the Conference Room, Main Studio, or Glide Cam. It has taken our staff a long time to clean up our data that's been housed in Facil. Before doing an import into MERCI, we wanted it to be in the best shape.

I just tried to install the OM Broadcast Synchronization module so that I could get a nice looking feed from the Telvue onto our Drupal site. I'm not seeing the permissions for the OM Broadcast Synchronization on the admin side and I don't see the new content types that I am supposed to after the install.

As part of the last phase of the Knight News Challenge grant I've been working to create a module to automate transfers to Archive.org of files available to Drupal. The development release is now ready, and we're continuing to test it here at Denver Open Media. My thanks go out to John Hauser at Access Humboldt, and the team at Archive.org who helped me navigate the S3-like interface and provided invaluable feedback in regards to handling metadata.

DrupalCon has just started and this has already been a very productive trip. When we first arrived in Europe, I met with Oliver Gibson from the Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisation. GMCVO is funding some MERCI development that will improve the integration with MERCI make it much easier to use MERCI as a staff driven solution. After a few days of sight seeing in London, we were off to Vaxjo, Sweden to work with Daniel Westergren on adapting the Open Media modules for his hosted environment. To do, we needed 2 things.

As a part of the Curriculum and Training Group, we have a work group exploring possible solutions for mapping Drupal production roles / job functions to competencies and to learning content. The objective may ultimately be to build a new module that will allow for the easy collection of topics and sub-topics across all curriculum and learning content, as well as a mechanism for managing and distributing such records. (Curriculum and Training Group: http://groups.drupal.org/curriculum-and-training)

I've been working hard on getting manual scheduling working correctly here at OMF. I just committed a new version of OM Timeslot Scheduler, which has a lot of changes. All output created by new functionality is separated off in a grey experimentation area only visible to user 1 and certain roles. Scheduling now supports the pairings module. There is also a non-pairings system section that I could use some help debugging, as it's hard for me to test on our system.

I'm trying to put my outrage at Andy Carvin's SXSW session proposal to good use. Can you imagine going to Boston to talk about Putting the Public Back in Public Media and not inviting someone from WGBH to participate? Why does Andy think it's okay to go to the city with one of the oldest access stations serving the public NPR and PBS have been ignoring all these year and not ask someone from channelAustin to participate in a discussion like that? In addition to the Open Media session Stefan and I proposed, there are several public access related sessions that you should vote for...

So I've finally made the move to St. Paul, MN and am working for Tightrope full time and only partially helping out my old PEG station through the internet. This means that I finally have some "free" time to do some developing for the Open Media Project. There has been a bunch of talk on IRC lately about separating some of the functionality in the different modules and I think Krenyen has already done a lot towards that with the simpler om_show module and the new om_airing module.

I'm completing an evaluation of the two-year OMP Beta-Test for Knight.
I'd love any help reaching Lane or Kate, as I want to get some opinions from them and PetePO about the disturbing fact that half of the point-people designated to manage the OMP for the beta-test partners were let go (or quit) within a few months of the initial implementation.

I'd also very much like to hear from all the partners about any unanticipated challenges or benefits.

You can post them to comments below, or email me at Tony at Open Media Foundation Org.

Been discussing with Craig from Amherst, Daniel from Sweden, and Kevin from Denver, ways that help requests or questions could be captured for purposes of creating better documentation. Here is one idea that is pretty simple actually. We would have to set up and agree to some rules.

The first rule. If anyone has a help request or question about some aspect of Open Media Project implementation, whether on IRC, GDO, ichat, etc., that question or request needs to be routed to one central location.

So I know this is something of a wide-ranging question but I was wondering if there were essential pieces I should know before trying out OM_Install+OM_Me? Seems to presently be the same moduleset kreynen mentioned in a previous post as OM_Lite.

I'm hoping to get CMAP to a point where they can begin using CiviCRM and OM_Project on a local dev install by next week and have enough information and configuration done for them to be able to move forward with MERCI deployment on their own.

Now that the Open Media Foundation has completed, or is about to complete, its obligations for the Knight Foundation grant to develop the Open Media Project, and now that we are at the same level on the playing field, with no one entity carrying any more weight, or responsibility, than any other, perhaps it is time that we, as co-equals, embrace a federation model, or some other egalitarian approach, for the creation of an association of developers, implementers, and end-users of the Open Media tools, with a guiding principal of openness and transparency in all communication and deliberations.